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Cartman Gets An Anal Probe
This is the first episode of Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "South Park" that aired on Comedy Central. The episode was originally 28 minutes which was too long to be aired, so Matt Stone and Trey Parker cut out 6 minutes, making it 22 minutes. Plot As Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman wait for the school bus, Kyle's little brother, Ike, tries to follow Kyle to school. Kyle tells Ike he cannot come to school with him. Cartman tells the boys about a dream he had the previous night about being abducted by aliens. The others try to convince him the events did happen and that the aliens are called "visitors", but Cartman refuses to believe them. Chef pulls up in his car and asks if the boys saw the alien spaceship the previous evening, inadvertently confirming Cartman's "dream", and relays stories of alien anal probes (which throughout the episode Cartman denies he experienced). After Chef leaves, the school bus picks up the boys, and (looking out the back window) they watch in horror as the visitors abduct Ike. Kyle spends the rest of the episode attempting to rescue him. At school, Cartman begins farting fire, and Kyle unsuccessfully tries to convince his teacher, Mr. Garrison, to excuse him from class to find his brother. When Chef learns that Kyle's brother was abducted and sees a machine emerge from Cartman's anus, he helps the boys escape from school by pulling the fire alarm. Once outside, Cartman reiterates that his abduction was only a dream, when suddenly he is hit by a beam, causing him to begin singing and dancing to I Love to Singa. Soon afterward, a spaceship appears. Kyle throws a stone and the spaceship fires back, propelling Kenny into the road. As he gets back up, he is trampled over by a herd of cows, but survives. A police car then runs Kenny over and kills him. Stan and Kyle meet Wendy at Stark's Pond, where she suggests using the machine lodged inside Cartman to contact the visitors. To lure them back, the children tie Cartman to a tree and, the next time he farts, a massive satellite dish emerges from his anus. The alien spaceship arrives and Ike jumps to safety. In the meantime, the visitors communicate with the cows in the area, having found them to be the most intelligent species on the planet. Cartman is again abducted by the aliens and returns to the bus stop the following day with pinkeye. Production The pilot episode was written by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and was directed by Parker; it was made on a budget of $300,000. Similarly to Parker and Stone's Christmas shorts, the original pilot was animated entirely with traditional cut paper stop motion animation techniques. This laborious process involved creating hundreds of construction paper cutouts – including individual mouth shapes, and many of the characters in several different sizes –, and photographing every frame of the show with an overhead camera, to the dialog that had been recorded earlier. Assistants helped with the cutting and pasting of the cutouts, while the animation was primarily done by Parker, Stone, and South Park animation director Eric Stough. The episode took between three and three and a half months to complete, and animation took place in a small room at Celluloid Studios, in Denver, Colorado, during the summer of 1996. Additional animation techniques involved creating the starry night sky by putting holes into a black posterboard and illuminating it from behind, and having the pooling of Kenny's blood simulated by drawing an initial dot with a red marker pen, and drawing more to it with every frame. The characters who are not speaking rarely move, saving time in the animation process. The finished pilot was 28 minutes long, which was too long to air, as Parker and Stone did not realize that more time should be allowed for television commercials during the half-hour spot reserved for an episode on Comedy Central. In order to shorten the episode to 22 minutes, the creators cut out about ten minutes worth of material, and added back another three minutes, in order to tie up the changed storyline. For example, in the original pilot, Cartman farts fire because some older kids feed him hot tamales, while in the shortened version, he does so because of the alien probe implanted in him. Other scenes focused more heavily on the character Pip. The scene where he is introduced was later inserted into the fifth episode of the series, "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig", in its original, cutout animation form. The storyline additions were created with the use of computer animation, and all subsequent episodes of the series have been computer animated. While the creators' aim was for the computer animation to visually simulate the cardboard cutout animation, the techniques were not perfected until later in the series, and as a result, the two styles of animation are easily distinguishable in the pilot. The idea for the town of South Park came from the real Colorado basin of the same name where, according to the creators, a lot of folklore and news reports originated about "UFO sightings, and cattle mutilations, and Bigfoot sightings." Parker and Stone's original intentions were to have the alien presence feature more frequently in the plot of subsequent episodes, but eventually they decided against this, as they did not want the show to look like a parody of the popular science fiction television series The X-Files. However, the crew started hiding aliens in the background in many South Park episodes as Easter eggs for fans, a tradition that goes back to Parker and Stone's first major collaboration, the 1993 independent film Cannibal! The Musical. Regarding the language in the episode, Parker has said that they "felt the pressure to live up to Spirit of Christmas", which contains a lot of obscenities, and as a result, they "tried to push things ... maybe further than we should". In particular, Parker said that they felt the need "to put in d***o and every word we can get away with." In contrast, they allowed subsequent episodes to "be more natural", saying that those episodes are "more about bizarre happenings and making fun of things that are taboo", "without just throwing a bunch of dirty words in there." "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" received poor results from test audiences and Comedy Central executives were uncertain whether to order additional episodes of the show. However, as the two original Christmas shorts, "Jesus vs. Frosty" and "Jesus vs. Santa", continued to produce Internet buzz, the network paid Parker and Stone to write one more episode. In writing "Weight Gain 4000", the duo sought to give the network an idea of how each episode could differ from the others. The network liked the script and agreed to commit to a series when Parker and Stone said they would not write another individual episode until Comedy Central signed off on a season of at least six episodes.